Don’t read this book if you’re looking for answers. You won’t find a blueprint for life. It doesn’t speculate about causes, cures, or strategies. It won’t tell you how to help your depressed spouse, how to manage your drugs, or convince you to take them at all. It will only tell you how it felt for Terri Cheney, and her story may give you reference points - a guide to understanding how it feels for others who live with manic depression.
It is a cautionary tale. The ending is hopeful, if only because she survived. The compromises she’s made to reach this point are, perhaps, unpalatable. If you are inclined to read accounts of car-crash lives in order to make you feel complacent in your own sanity, remember the statistics. It’s closer than you think.
I realise I really want my review to do this book justice. I really want lay-psychiatrists to read it. I really want armchair psychologists to spend a few pages getting under the skin of this illness and to walk a mile in Terri Cheney’s shoes. I need those who would disregard the experiences as unbelievable to embrace the absurdity of life with bipolar, and to cross over into a different dimension where the rules simply don’t apply.
Only then will you free your compassion.
Article comments
1 - Pat
I read the review with much interest, as the Grandmom of a 6 1/2 year old who has had the diagnosis for 1 1/2 years. We struggle to learn all we can and to remain hopeful for this preciously gifted child. She sings at the drop of a pin and remembers exceptionally well.
2 - orchid
I did not like the book. Terri Cheney is completely self-absorbed and unsympathetic. She has added nothing to the genre. Obviously, she did not read Kay Redfield Jamisons, "Flights of the Mind." Now, that is an account of bipolar disorder worth reading. Cheney's book is shallow, distant, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I would discourage intelligent people from reading it. It's suitable for the stupid masses, but not for thinking adults. You'd stick to Jamison if you're smart.
3 - orchid
Excuse me. Jamison's memoir is titled, "An Unquiet Mind." I was confusing the titles of two of her books.
4 - coryluscontorta
I have read both, though it has been some time since I picked up Jamieson's. I read ‘An Unquiet Mind’ directly after my diagnosis, on the advice of my psychiatrist. I found her experiences to be distant from my own; they didn't speak to me of the chaos the illness creates around you. The flowery rhetoric was ultimately hopeful and hers is a story of a woman who goes on to recover her life and her success. The reality is that many sufferers lose so much; their dignity not least of all. My experience of bipolar was powerlessness as my life turned into a black cartoon, my job, my husband and my friends melted away along with my grip on reality. Even today I find my life compromised in order to maintain a euthymic condition and I have to choose who I tell for fear of being ostracised. That is why ‘Manic’ spoke to me in a way that An Unquiet Mind didn’t, but each to their own.
Given that the media image of the condition is still to demonise sufferers, anything which contributes to the debate and the volume of information for sufferers and non sufferers alike, must surely be positive. Both books contribute to the genre in different ways â€" one weightier, academic and ‘spiritual’ the other grittier and verging on sensationalist. My general advice to those who know nothing is to read one, read the other, but for gods sake, read something.